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There remains the question whether the body possesses any
force of its own- so that, with the incoming of the soul, it
lives in some individuality- or whether all it has is this Nature
we have been speaking of, the superior principle which enters
into relations with it.
Certainly the body, container of soul and of nature, cannot even
in itself be as a soulless form would be: it cannot even be like
air traversed by light; it must be like air storing heat: the
body holding animal or vegetive life must hold also some shadow
of soul; and it is body thus modified that is the seat of
corporeal pains and pleasures which appear before us, the true
human being, in such a way as to produce knowledge without
emotion. By "us, the true human being" I mean the higher soul
for, in spite of all, the modified body is not alien but attached
to our nature and is a concern to us for that reason: "attached,"
for this is not ourselves nor yet are we free of it; it is an
accessory and dependent of the human being; "we" means the
master-principle; the conjoint, similarly is in its own way an
"ours"; and it is because of this that we care for its pain and
pleasure, in proportion as we are weak rather than strong,
gripped rather than working towards detachment.
The other, the most honourable phase of our being, is what we
think of as the true man and into this we are penetrating.
Pleasure and pain and the like must not be attributed to the soul
alone, but to the modified body and to something intermediary
between soul and body and made up of both. A unity is
independent: thus body alone, a lifeless thing, can suffer no
hurt- in its dissolution there is no damage to the body, but
merely to its unity- and soul in similar isolation cannot even
suffer dissolution, and by its very nature is immune from evil.
But when two distinct things become one in an artificial unity,
there is a probable source of pain to them in the mere fact that
they were inapt to partnership. This does not, of course, refer
to two bodies; that is a question of one nature; and I am
speaking of two natures. When one distinct nature seeks to
associate itself with another, a different, order of being- the
lower participating in the higher, but unable to take more than a
faint trace of it- then the essential duality becomes also a
unity, but a unity standing midway between what the lower was and
what it cannot absorb, and therefore a troubled unity; the
association is artificial and uncertain, inclining now to this
side and now to that in ceaseless vacillation; and the total
hovers between high and low, telling, downward bent, of misery
but, directed to the above, of longing for unison.
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